In a few weeks, some Activators (Trent, Sridhar and Mike) will be leaving Vancouver and all its Olympic buzz to go to one of the best conferences for Python coding. It is called PyCon 2010 and it is in Atlanta, Georgia from February 17-25, 2010 (main conference days are Feb 19-21).

Setting up your project on ActiveState Firefly is quick and easy, and it can save your team a lot of time and effort because you don't have to worry about managing the infrastructure and integrating all the pieces yourself.

This screencast steps through creating a project, and shows off some great Firefly features.

Getting started with issue tracking is much more than deciding on a software application or hosted service. It requires taking stock of team and client culture to arrive at a smooth and productive workflow. In the first part of this 2-part post, we talked about starting with the basics of what your choice of issue tracking system offers and growing from there, as well as defining terms for describing issues consistently across the whole team. In this post, we’ll look at more high-level aspects of implementing issue tracking in your team’s practices.

Got issues to manage? Most software teams do. They’re to-do lists that get angry when they don’t get done, and they can make teamwork flow through the day or end up in an unmanaged state. If your email inbox is the only tool you’re using to track issues, you’re more likely treading water than swimming. And it’s just that feeling that brings many development teams to an issue tracking system to get a handle on bugs and feature requests. With that in mind, we have a 2-part post of guidelines for getting started with issue tracking.

Matt Assay has once more delivered some great info - this time on the openness of the Dutch to.... open source! The Dutch government is apparently running a wealth of open source as of this year. Matt shares a map of all the open source products the Dutch are running and offers an English translation of it. Very enlightening!

More developers means faster development, right? Wrong. When you add a new developer, it feels like you add developer2 connections. And more connections equal new ways to waste time and lose vital information.